So far as the superstructures of their two lives were concerned,—­the part of them that floated above the level of consciousness, the whole fabric of their thoughts and theories and ideals, that made them to their friends and to each other, and very largely to themselves, Rose and Rodney,—­they were as far apart as on the day she had left his house.  There hadn’t been, since then, a word between them of argument or compromise.  The great impasse was still unforced.  He hadn’t, as yet, shown that he could give her the friendship she demanded.  She’d had no chance to tell him of any of the small triumphs and disciplines of her new life that she hoped would win it from him.

And as for Rodney, he was the same man who, an hour ago, in the theater, had raged and writhed under what he felt to be an invasion of his proprietary rights in her.

He wouldn’t have defined it that way, to be sure, in a talk with Barry Lake.  Would have denied, indeed, with the best of them, that a husband had any proprietary rights in his wife.  But the intolerable sense of having become an object of derision, or contemptuous pity, of being disgraced and of her being degraded, through the appearance on the stage of a public theater, of a woman who was his wife; and through her exhibition, for pay, of charms he had always supposed would be kept for him, couldn’t derive from anything else but just that.  He’d waited there in the alley, full of bitter thoughts that were ready to leap forth in denunciations.  He’d waited there, ready, he thought, to use actual physical force on her, in the unthinkable event of its becoming necessary, to drag her out of this pit where he had found her, back to his side again.

But somehow, when he had heard her speak his name, he’d begun to tremble.  And when he had felt her trembling, too, the bitter phrases had died on his tongue and the thoughts that propelled them were smothered like fire under sand.  And as he’d stood confronting her in her mean little room, his eyes searching her face, all he had been looking for was a sign of the hunger—­the ages-old hunger—­that was devouring him.  And when he’d found it, that was enough for him.  The great issue that was to be fought out between them remained intact, but the hunger had to be satisfied first.

It was hours later, in the very dead of the night, as he sat on the edge of the bed, with his back to her, that the old sense of outrage and degradation, almost as suddenly as it had left him, came back.  And came back in a way that made it more intolerable than ever.  For the clear flame of it had lost its clarity; the confidence that had fanned it was gone—­the sense of his own rightness.  The irresistible surge of passion that had carried him off, had destroyed that.  The flame smoked and smoldered.

“Have you anything here,” he asked her dully, “besides what will go in your trunk?”

It was the surliness of his tone, rather than the words themselves, that startled her.